What a huge disappointment Obama is, I’m sure both to himself and to all those non-white Americans who had so much hope invested in his first term. I too had hoped for a radical change in world politics but the globalised corporate world is bigger than politics and indeed now pays for most party politicians. All those hopes have been defeated by the corrupt corporate mess that US and world politics has become.

promises change but changes promises instead

As most of you may have realised by now, Obama’s speech calling for the UK to stay in the EU (or Ewe as young Hollywood actresses call all distasteful things) was written by our Dave and his speech writers. When he said that the UK would be at the end of the queue for a post Brexit trade agreement with the USA he gave the game away. Americans don’t do queues, Americans have no idea what a queue is, they say line. One of Obama’s aids was seen to wince when the word queue came out of the presidential orifice; it was not in the original script.

The real reason that Obama, and corporate USA fear the UK leaving the EU is that our exit will hasten the inevitable collapse of the Euro by removing the second largest net contributor to the EU.Not only that, the UK & Germany are the only two members of the EU who actually pay attention to the laws that the Luxembourg autocrats produce.

The EU is in a real economic mess. German banks are charging customers to save with them, the immigration crisis is stretching resources to the limits and the required speedy EU response to all these huge issues is impossible to achieve. The banks must be saved at all costs and this flawed thinking is pushing the real cost of the 2007 banking failure on to this and the next generation rather than those who actually caused the problem. Greece is still bust, as is Portugal and Italy and the sooner we are out of this children’s playground disaster area the better.

Our exit will indeed hasten short term economic chaos, but mainly for the EU. This chaos would have happened in time anyway! The EU is financially incompetent, completely undemocratic, inefficient in the extreme and just too damn big to be of any use to its citizens. My last article explored the issue of globalised business and its effects on the small guys, you and me.

Our politicians, Labour and Conservative are not thinking logically, they are thinking party politically. The one thing all politicians do best, is to kick difficult decisions into the long grass so that they will have retired by the time their inaction and crap decision making is spotted by the rest of us.

Let me leave you with a good example of a queue. Pictures below and the richest billionaires in India waiting in line to meet Obama on a recent visit, led of course by the now infamous Mr Tata himself!

Everyone I meet who is even minimally interested in the EU, knows that Cameraman’s EU negotiations have been pointless from the start. The charade continues to be supported by the BBC and most journalists because “the story” fills up the time available for news broadcasts and keeps everyone busy.

… and anyway, I’m off soon anyway, and then it’s all over to Boris & George…

There is no reason at all to link the date of the promised referendum to what Cameraman is doing. Yet this is being presented as being a necessary step!

Absolute poppycock. (I would have preferred to use the word bollocks, but Chaucerian invective is out of fashion, so I am told).

Jacob Rees Mogg said it if too politely (please watch him by clicking on the “said it” link) ; “what has been asked for is fundamentally trivial”, “two of the four demands are gradually happening anyway”, “the third demand will never be accepted and the fourth part (the time delay for benefits availability) would not make very much difference to the numbers of EU immigrants coming here.

Simple facts have been ignored. Britain is the fifth largest economy in the world with Germany fourth and France sixth. Italy is eighth and the Netherlands seventeenth and the other 23 member states are way down the list. Child benefit in Romania is £2 per week and £16 here. In short, the economies are so diverse that “ever closer union” is just plain daft and a common currency was always daft.

The reason so many people want to come to Britain is that we have a higher standard of living, a humane police force, stability and Radio 4. Well OK, perhaps that last one is more about me than them 😉 , but we have a culture that is the envy of the world and a minimum wage to drool over, if you are Romanian that is.

Cameron’s original idea of “reform” was supposed to apply to all EU members, remember that? Well, the so called ‘trivial’ reforms, if ever agreed, will only ever apply to Britain. The whole process is meaningless, time consuming drivel.

What Cameraman has not demanded are the really important things:

a) Financial competence please: The EU is systemically incapable of financial competence. Nineteen years of accounts which cannot be supported by its auditors! Yup, the EU’s accounts have never provided a “true and fair view” of financial matters.

b) Democracy please: The EU is undemocratic by design. The MEPs (salaries vastly higher than our own MPs) have no say on policy and spend most of their time arguing over wording in committees for legislation that most people in Europe find irritating, pointless or plain daft.

c) Immigration control please. Measures which make sense to you and me.

d) The Euro is a daft currency, based purely on party political desires rather than any economic common sense. Greece, Portugal, Italy and Spain are still as bust as they were 3 years ago and the danger of the Euro collapsing has not gone away. The German Central bank is now charging negative interest to some depositors! The whole economics of the Euro is a joke. The EU is hell bent on supporting the banking system rather than the little people (that’s you and me and your Polish plumber whose kids still live in Poland).

e) The EU is too beholden to corporate interests, and the behind-closed-doors negotiations over the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) confirm this. This poses a huge threat to our environmental standards, consumer protections and workers’ rights. If you don’t know what TTIP is then please find out!

f) We would like the EEC back please – that sort of made sense.

We need to get out of this oversized, potty political union as soon as possible before it bankrupts us.

The only beneficiaries of staying in the EU are globalised business and oversized banks.

Peter Brookes says it beautifully in his cartoon which, incidentally, was printed a full six weeks before Saudi Arabia executed 45 ‘enemies of state’.

It’s becoming clear that our view of Saudi Arabia is in need of review (Ed: Understatement of the decade?).

Meanwhile our boys have carried out 4 bombing raids in Syria with absolutely nothing to show for their efforts. All the hoohah in the recent Parliamentary debate was really about being seen to be friends with our friends. There was no sensible plan to remove IS and and there still isn’t. But, hey ho, the vote was won, the party political points scored, and we all move on because the arguments against bombing were a bit too difficult to contemplate.

The West’s hands are tied by commercial considerations, outdated political alignments and our own political system which is far too short sighted for any sensible long term plan to be made. That is the reality of democratic systems such as ours; in the long term it will prove to be the best system for humanity, but in the short term it makes decision making difficult.

Meanwhile, the 7th century totalitarian regime of ISIS now holds territory in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Mali, Libya, and Somalia. Support for IS grows in Tunisia, Algeria, Yemen and Nigeria where it is apparently replacing Boko Haram as the main Islamist threat.

Cameraman’s answer to IS extremism?

The announcement yesterday of a £20m scheme to teach Muslim women English. As long as their husbands, uncles and brothers approve, of course!

I wonder, how will all those burqa clad women, who currently can’t speak or read English, find out about his new plan? Hmm. (Ed: you may have a point!)

Perhaps 30 years ago might have been the time to promote integration measures funded by government, but now it is arguably pointless. The mad pluralist, multi cultural society is firmly in place, supported by misguided liberal intellectuals and all the main political parties . The face of many cities in Britain has been changed forever and we are host to a huge minority whose cultural differences threaten former British norms with little sign of integration outside of Londonistahn.

Meanwhile, on British TV, the Islam channel has a fascinating program entitled Islam Q&A, airing each night at 8pm. I have watched it a few times, and I don’t know whether to laugh, cry or to invade Birmingham and Bradford myself.

Why this misogynistic tirade on TV can be tolerated in Britain today is beyond bonkers. Along side the Islam Channel, the largely USA evangelical, supposedly Christian, TV channels are just as bonkers and almost as scary.

Many of the callers to Islam Q&A are women who are being abused or restrained by their husbands. The advice from the scholar or Imam is usually to obey your husband and learn to respect him. Other questions usually concern the minutiae of the practises of Islam, e.g. how to wash correctly. Apparently, Allah will forgive disabled Muslims who have a problem observing the otherwise required rituals.

Scary, alien stuff. It shouldn’t be scary but it is.

Watch the program yourself or, perhaps, if our Dave actually watched it, we might have a politician who could see how far we have fallen into cultural identity loss. The existence of the Islam channel is the strongest argument itself for a rigorous policy review of practical integration measures and, dare I say it, the closure of all the Saudi funded Madrassas in the UK.

To achieve that we would of course have to address the thorny issue of all faith schools and until we do, the Britain we all love will continue to disappear.

My previous article on this scary issue highlighted the ISIS belief that Dabiq (a tiny town in Syria) is the place where Jesus will arrive shortly. Good Muslim as Jesus assuredly is, his arrival will kick start the worldwide Islamic Caliphate. (See the acknowledgements at the end of this article for a history of the village of Dabiq, population 4,000, that is, until IS moved there in 2014.)

Dabiq, strangely enough, is also the name of the ISIS monthly magazine, a full colour job expertly produced and full of interesting snippets of news. (Ed: do I detect irony? Err: Oh well, OK, yes)

The magazine reads a bit like a budget statement from Gordon Brown in his heyday. It drones on, and on, in language that is hypnotic, drab, humourless, boring and pontificating in tone; just like the Qur’an in fact…

Here are a few highlights of issue 11 of Dabiq:

IS now have their own currency, the golden dinar. Twitter hashtag #return_of_the_gold_dinar (Yup, IS uses Twitter to spread its messages)

We ask Allah to support the mujhidin of the Islamic State against the agents of the tawght and the crusaders until the banner of the Khilfah is raised high above Istanbul and Vatican City.

{O you who have believed, do not take the Jews and the Christians as allies. They are allies of one another. And whoever is an ally to them among you – then indeed, he is one of them. Indeed, Allah guides not the wrongdoing people} [Al-M?’idah: 51]” [Naw?qid al-Islam]. (The verse reference in the Qur’an).

Yes, those who abandon jihad are akin to the fornicators, the sodomites, and the drunkards, and yet the claimants of Islam request the mujahidin to blindly follow these sinful “scholars,” those who prefer to sit in the shades of the tawght and crusaders rather than perform jihad against the kuffar…

And finally, this about so-called moderate Muslims … “not bothering to educate their readers of the Muslim’s obligation to reject kufr, separate himself from the kuffar, abandon their lands, harbor enmity and hatred towards them, and wage war against them until they submit to the truth.”

… and so on, and on, and on …

We musttake IS as seriously as they take themselves.

Are you listening Dave?

Acknowledgements: Peter Brookes (The Times Saturday 28th November 2015) for the cartoon.

The strategic importance of Dabiq is discussed in a lengthy but authoritative Guardian article here. Fascinating stuff, please find the time to read it.

Dabiq issue 11, may be downloaded in its full glory here, from my own website, so it’s free from nasties. (Warning: it is 55Mb and some readers may find it distressing.)

… party politics! Party politics has stifled any adult discussion of the threat we face from IS (Islamic State) and no, it’s not ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq & Levant, the Jewish / USA version) or Daesh the Arabic acronym which actually they do not like. For a full discussion of the name(s) of this primitive barbaric organisation see here.

Bombs away, Hurray!

Everywhere in the media, even in our best political discussion programs, journalists and politicians consume 90% of the time discussing the party politics of the issue, the “whipping procedure”, the free vote issue, the future of Corbyn, the “new politics”, to whip or not to whip etc. yawn etc. Anything indeed, apart from the detail required to end this sad bit of history.

It is nonsense of course, but leaders of IS believe a 7th century prophecy. The Syrian town of Dabiq is where the second coming of Jesus will take place imminently. That is why the IS caliphate-in-waiting is centred on Syria.

The Second Coming heralds the start of the world wide caliphate and the end of all of us disbelievers. We Kuffar are anybody who is not a Muslim, and moreover, you have to be the right kind of Muslim and that is Sunni. Pleasefollow the Kuffar link (previous sentence) to read an earnest debate about whether or not Muslims should actually play basketball with the unbelievers; read and weep at the ignorance and stupidity we have to fight.

What we will probably have today, after the vote in parliament, is a concerted effort to bomb Raqqa in Syria, but I suspect that IS are already decentralising as our politicians discuss the shape of the discussion table.

BUT…

Where is the plan for reconstruction of Syria? Who is paying?

Where are the foot soldiers of Saudi Arabia, China, Russia, Germany NATO and the USA? Without them, and their money, there can be no lasting solution. We need those boots on the ground to maintain the peace once the bombing stops. We will probably need the boots on the ground for years to come.

Have all these players met to discuss the long term solution? Err, no.

If the last 100 years of Middle East misery have taught us any lessons at all, it is that bombing the enemy might make good copy for the journalists and gung-ho politicians, but it actually achieves nothing. Corbyn is quite right but nobody can listen to the detailed arguments he has put because he has put them so badly. The British population seem not to be ready for the new politics of discussion and the detailed thought it needs.

A bombing campaign is probably required, but as a small part of the overall action we need to take, but only as support for the boots on the ground of a UN led united army.

The murderous, brain-washed, teenagers who carry out the killings and those who command them follow the barbaric rules of the Qur’an to the letter. IS is not interested in discussion. Old men in beards have Allah and the Qur’an as their narrative.

However, the vast majority of Muslims are not the problem, they, like you and me, just want to work, school their children and live in peace.

Islam, however, is the problem along with the West’s politically correct inability to fight back with reason.

I’m tired of repeating this but just read the damn book yourself, you will soon see what I mean!

This Tory government has learned nothing from Thatcher’s disastrous reign of myopic, crass decision making or that of New Labour’s 13 incompetent years at the helm. It cannot see beyond Cameraman’s departure two years hence (yes – two) and is making huge errors of mismanagement in three vital areas of Britain’s future.

Embracing China’s mad, humourless, greedy, globalised capitalism is a huge mistake. China’s recent stock market corrections are but a hiccup compared to the real correction required to adjust for the debt mountain based on the empty cities all over China. These property investments are still recorded on the Chinese and the world’s banks as assets. They are anything but!

Ignore the bubble at your (yellow) peril 😉

Ignoring China’s primitive and barbaric attitude to human rights is a crime and denies everything that Britishness should stand for!

Encouraging China to build our, sadly now necessary, nuclear power stations is beyond stupid! The decision is based on the same incompetent logic of New Labour’s disastrous PFI contracts to build new hospitals and schools etc. The decision is based on presentation rather than economic sense.

Why on earth do they keep on making the same mistake?

The answer is, that PFI does not affect current government debt figures, so Osborne looks good and sounds sensible. However, it pushes the real, and hugely inflated cost, way into the future. Today’s decision makers will have retired on their gold plated pensions and cannot be held to account. Those future PFI costs are far higher than they would be if we did the sensible thing and borrowed the cash now at all time low interest rates.

All the current agreement does is guarantee huge future returns for China but dooms our children’s children to higher than necessary energy costs.

Good for China’s long term economics, but so obviously bad for us.

Government should be borrowing cash now, while it is historically cheap to do so, but it will not because of party political ideology. Bonkers, criminally incompetent financial mismanagement unchallenged by Corbyn’s Labour party because they can’t think straight either.

Labour cannot be too critical here because of the Blair / Brown era of financial incompetence.

Meanwhile, Germany’s steel industry thrives because it is being supported by Merkel’s government, completely ignoring the EU’s rules on state subsidy by the way. We can’t do the same because our steel capability is owned by India plus we keep on following the damn silly EU rules that Germany, France and Italy just laugh at.

Cameraman & Osborne are blindly completing Thatcher’s disastrous short term view of manufacturing and finishing off the population of the north east for good.

Our steel industry is now dead after today’s announcement by Tata (You know, those Indian chappies who bought our steel industry some time back ;-( ).

Germany took that enlightened, long term decision when Japan’s recent nuclear disaster gave us all a taste of what happens when things go wrong when power generation is too centralised! Remember Eric Schumacher’s 1973 book Small is Beautiful?. Germany’s politicians took note while ours went out to lunch.

Milk production is all but destroyed in Britain while food imports continue to rise to support a supermarket model which is failing. This reign of madness is seemingly unchallenged by Labour because of its own past incompetence.

Our membership of the EU is of course to blame too, effectively stopping Britain from taking a long term view of food production and manufacturing.

Long term thinking is completely missing from our governing and political classes.

In the light of the human misery being played out on Europe’s borders, I summarise some recent news coverage and offer a long term solution.

Can’t say that!

Hundreds of thousands of foreign Muslims are trying to migrate to northern Europe from Syria and Iraq, to name but two countries.

A few hundred British Muslims have left for Syria to help set up an Islamic Caliphate in parts of Syria and Iraq.

I wonder if those travelling to Syria have wondered why so many of their Muslim brothers and sisters are trying to escape from Islam’s shiny new Caliphate?

I wonder why the following, rich and Muslim, countries have not taken in a single refugee or asylum seeker; Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE)?

I heard a few Muslim school children being interviewed, on BBC Radio 4’s Today program last week, at Kirkleas college in Huddersfield. The government is so concerned about this college that it has been designated a priority area for Safeguarding & Prevent (weird poli-speak meaning anti-brainwashing plus a scheme to encourage locals to identify potential jihadi teenagers).

A special team has been installed, in the college, to help fight so-called radicalistion. Polly Harrow, the head of the Safeguarding and Prevent team, failed to criticise those students who had anti-gay views, and actually said ‘Its your right to hold those views in private, but to voice them in public might be breaking the law!’

So, so gentle and so, so missing the opportunity to correct or offer an alternative view.

She might have added that to oppose the smallest IS law means death! She further hinted that the children’s parents were keeping quiet and were of no help at all.

Equality & diversity is being promoted rather than a criticism of primitive views as part of government policy to fight radicalisation.

Respect for homo phobia was OK it seems as long as you don’t shout about it!

The ignorance and primitive views held by these children was truly horrifying, here are a few quotes:

‘I don’t blame dem, they are looking for a better laaf, a luxury laaf out dare (meaning Syria)’

‘Its da new new trend” (for boys to wanna go out dare)’

‘Yeah, I’d go, its my raght innit?’

I wonder where that last young man thought he got his rights from? Forget your raghts in IS fairyland. Try to leave IS and you are beheaded or worse.

Cocooned and isolated and often educated separately from British mainstream views, these kids had no idea of the reason their grandparents came here in the first place.

The Today interview Radio 4, 18th September 07:32 – 07:42, is available on iPlayer if you can stomach it!

The rest of this article is all about a long term and lasting solution. Shorter term actions that need to be taken by world politicians are probably best advised by organisations like the Quilliam Foundation who have an in depth understanding of the Middle East.

Even such eminent think tanks seem unable to challenge the fundamental elephant in the room, faith.

Long term, we can onlydefeat Islamic state (IS) with the philosophy of the European Enlightenment, wherein reason replaced faith.

The philosophy of those ancient Greek philosophers, Socrates and Plato (Confucius and the Buddha were on the right track too), modified and developed by many free thinking European minds in the 17th /18th centuries, is a message of reason, debate and intelligent questioning of everything. It was mankind’s coming of age, a recognition that each one of us is responsible for ourselves and each other.

Or rather, it should have been. Vested interests, the monarchy, politicians, and faith pedlars, all of whom have a lot of power to lose, used all the power they had to keep primitive belief systems in mainstream thought.

My plan, if ever implemented, would however take around 50 years, i.e. two to three generations to work. But, it would work.

This of course cannot happen with a political system built on policies that work on a three year party political cycle, so welcome to the almost inevitable Islamic state of Great Britain of 2045.

However, this plan will work, must be set in motion and is the only plan that could work.

Here is the why (the how is a bit more difficult to arrange).

Long term decisions need to be made, but, actions to be started now:-

1) Recognise that faith is an irrational state of mind, formed when young minds are most malleable and open to subversion. A young mind, infected with faith, accepts fairy tales as truths which are almost impossible to remove in later life. Faith induces a childish mental state of dependency wherein individuals no longer think for themselves and crave a higher authority to look after them. Faith is dangerous because it is irrational. Differing faiths cannot ever agree because each person, infected with their own faith virus strain, feels strongly that theirs is the only true one! Furthermore, that feeling of righteousness leads to violence where young minds are rendered unable to question their particular version of theocratic nonsense.

2) Therefore, we must cease teaching faith as a worthwhile state of mind to children. Children must be protected from faith.

3) Recognise that publicly funded faith schools are socially divisive and must be slowly converted to secular schools, over a few years. Philosophy would be taught from the age of 4 rather than RE.

4) Privately funded religious schools are declared socially divisive and are closed down, or reformed if possible, as part of the plan.

These are vital for the creation of a nation of young minds who have been trained to ask questions rather that accept dogma.

This faith virus explains why so many, apparently well western educated doctors and engineers have been turned into jihadi fighters.

It should logically follow, that the Church of England is disestablished from government. Once that has happened, there really is no further justification for a constitutional monarchy, other than for the requirements of the tourism industry. Yes, I know this is hard to accept, but the logical consequence of promoting reason over faith is a generation of children who have been taught to think for themselves. The removal of all religion to the private sphere is the best government can do to stem the crisis.

Short term actions:-

1) ISIS returnees, what to do? Either, send them back as they return, or, tear up their passports and put them into holding cells. If they really want to live here, then they are tagged and forced to attend philosophy classes.

However, there is no time to re-educate most of them, the damage has been done by our own education system!

3) The armed forces of the USA, France, Britain and Russia (the main culprits in creating the middle East crisis after WW1!) crush Syria’s Assad and replace him with a secular government. Yes we will have to bribe Russia and China behind the scenes but since they are both as bust as the West is, they will hopefully see sense.

Don’t want to do that?

Think its all impossible?

Unnecessarily alarmist?

Well that’s not going to happen is it?

No, well, I suppose you are right.

Sadly, I agree with you, and since the European Enlightenment is dismissed as ‘old fashioned’ by Prince Charles our soon to be Defender of all faiths, we are stuffed.

Welcome to Londonistahn, new capital of the Islamic Caliphate of Ingerland 2045 innit.

This piece has been coming for a while now but recent talk of the new Fox hunting bill, and the Scottish National Party’s temporary successes recently, kicked it back into life.

The United Kingdom of Great Britain is the name of this country, which I love, and in which, I live. The name describes poetically, and politically, where the British people live and how we expect to be governed. It took over a fifteen hundred years to unite this island’s disparate warring tribes into this, perhaps imperfect, but more mature than most, united nation.

West Lothian question – hmmm..?

I am writing this because our career party politicians seem to have forgotten how much we have achieved in this United Kingdom of Great Britain.

Over many hundreds of years, much blood was spilled, many compromises were made and hard lessons were learned, some of which are now in danger of being forgotten.

Simply put, we are British first. We are English, Scottish. Welsh and Irish second. If we lost that identity and concept we deny the slow but sure evolution of the last 1500 years.

Our modern career politicians seem to have become confused over what it means to be British and seem not to be aware of the importance of what we have become and how it all happened.

Surely, we would want any Member of Parliament, of that United Kingdom of Great Britain, to vote for all matters British, whether or not they be Scottish, Northern Irish (for the time being at least), Welsh or English?

Of course there should be some issues devolved to local democratic institutions but that is where huge irrational decisions have been made, started by Blair but continued under the coalition and now the Tory administration. This process of questioning the validity of the Westminster parliament’s ability to administer Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland started with Blair’s often lauded but flawed Northern Ireland peace process. That process ended up with a botched devolution to the current dysfunctional Northern Ireland assembly. It continued with Blair trying to devolve power to the North of England but the people said no, quite loudly!

This principle (the United bit) is vital in order to retain that part of our hard won identity. The SNP, largest amongst other small minded nationalist parties, have forgotten how we are where we are in an egotistical rush to attack Westminster centric career politicians. Their attack on Westminster-centric polishituns is of course quite warranted, but if it threatens the united part, they are fighting the right cause, but in completely the wrong way.

Devolution, as implemented in the UK, is an unusual, illogical and messy way of dispersing power. Whilst devolution errors can be attributed to ministerial incompetence, there is another area where democratic accountability has been quite consciously removed. Since Thatcher’s disastrous era, successive governments have been madly creating quangos(*1) to remove responsibility from from the democratically appointed ministerial positions, which should rightly bear responsibility.

This self serving, slimy abrogation of responsibility is at the root of much of the we the people’s disaffection with today’s polishituns.

Remember this? The 2010 coalition were going to scrap Quangos, until they realised that ministers might have to be responsible again!

‘English votes for English laws is a logical absurdity’, I quote Vernon Bogdanor, who just happens to be the Oxford Don who taught Dave Cameron political philosophy at Oxford.

See here for the explanation of the absurdity. His explanation is tough going but please try to see what he is getting at!

Bright he may be, but Cameron is not as wise as his Oxford First degree might suggest. It came as a great surprise to me when I realised, years ago, that intelligence and wisdom are not necessarily connected. Sadly, so it is with most of the political class.

The Scottish people voted soundly and sensibly in their independence referendum. They rejected the apparent desire of the SNP to break up Britain. The Scottish National Party’s subsequent, and to many, surprising success, is founded upon the inability of Westminster centric party politicians to understand the importance of the real meaning of “The United Kingdom of Great Britain”.

The Scottish independence issue and the “West Lothian” problem are symptoms of this lack of educated understanding amongst our party political London centric leaders. Indeed, the whole devolution issue is blown out of all proportion precisely because our politicians have lost the plot.

Let us remember our history and continue the slow development of the oldest parliamentary democracy together as an Island nation.

Our misguided attempts at devolution have gone too far.

Further devolution risks destroying the very United Kingdom of Great Britain.

In time, we will hand back Northern Ireland to Eire; we will hand back the Falklands to the Argentinians and we will hand back Gibraltar to Spain and perhaps the Channel Islands to the Duke of Normandy ;-). That is simply the inevitable logic of economics, and geography. The party politics of the problem is the sticking point!

Furthermore, we need statesmen and women, the calibre of which we have not seen since Churchill and Atlee, yet but so desperately need now.

We will also, in time, become a republic (not, heaven forbid, a caliphate 😉 ), having disestablished the Church of England from government (by “right”) and removed our ever so slightly ridiculous monarchy.

That will probably take several decades, but I hope I live to see it!

*1 Quasi Autonomous Non-Governmental Organisations, are completely undemocratic bodies (by design) which are supposed to control the regulation on banks, utility companies and many more. Offwat, Offgen, Offqual and the other two hundred or so.

You pay for them but they are not answerable to you!

The reason for their existence is to protect government ministers from having to take responsibility for their flawed decision making. The buck has been well and truly passed. Quangos are quietly not doing (because nobody really checks) what government should be doing, clever eh?

I am greatly amused by the frantic anti Jeremy Corbyn campaign being waged by the other three Labour party leadership contenders. 😉

They simply do not understand why Corbyn is so popular with many Labour supporters, and many of us. The reason is, that Andy Burnham, Liz Kendall and Yvette Cooper (AKA Mrs Balls) are still speaking and thinkingpoli-balls. They have not twigged that we the people don’t like it.

The bookies’ view of the candidates support in the labour party, according to the Daily Telegraph

(Ed: I wonder why Ms Cooper uses her maiden name? Me: Can’t imagine…)

Poli-balls is my description for the meaningless drivel that politicians started spouting from around the time of Tony Bliar. It is the same slimy, smarmy, indifferent language used by Blair, Cameron and all the other career politicians that the rest of the nation have come to loathe.

Jeremy Corbyn uses the same language as Nigel Farage. Its called English, and we understand both of them. They are the only two politicians worth listening to at the moment, and that does not say much for the state of government in the United Kingdom of Great Britain.

Even the Labour deputy leader campaign, started a few days ago, produces the same meaningless claptrap:-

“We need to become a campaigning party again” said one of them. She said that phrase about ten times during a short interview on the Radio 4 Today program last week. Her confused thinking is typical of today’s career party politician who has forgotten that they are there to serve the people of Great Britain. They, however, are only concerned with the future existence of the party and that consumes 90% of their time. My contention is that the party is well and truly over. We the people want something else.

Another answer to the phenomenon, is that many labour party supporters don’t see the need for yet another Conservative party. After all, we already have three of them, New Labour, Liberal Democrats and the Conservative party itself 😉

Yet another answer is that Jeremy Corbyn is speaking common sense. He suggests, amongst other ideas, that we:-

a) Re-nationalise our rail system.

b) Re-nationalise our National Grid.

I wholeheartedly agree, and I would add that there are some things that should be in public ownership; our water supply being the prime example. Those national assets were sold off by Thatcher, desperate to balance the books when she took us to war over the Falklands.

As for Yvette Cooper saying that Corbyn’s policies are a backward step, I would say that he is simply wanting to correct the humongous privatisation errors committed by that dreadful Thatcher administration in the 1980s

Clueless Cooper, Boring Burnham and Kendall Fruitcake are lost in their own funny little world. If any one of them is elected next leader, that is the end of the labour party for generations to come.

Jeremy Corbyn is not the answer either. He has the faith virus and has said many times that religious belief should be respected.

Why on earth should I respect a religion that places women 8 feet behind a man, literally and metaphorically (Islam)

Why on earth should I respect a religion that goes to extraordinary lengths to protect child molesting priests? (Roman Catholicism).

Why on earth should I respect a religion that demands that prawns and pigs are the spawn of hell (Judaism and Islam)?

I can barely tolerate those banal, silly and primitive, messages, but respect them? Respect for religions is a flawed liberal position which need changing by our leaders, and fast!

RIP.

We don’t like all of what Nigel or Jeremy have to say, but sadly they are the best of a sad bunch.

A BBC reporter was interviewing one persistent, but as yet unsuccessful, immigrant on the recent death of his friend. “How are you feeling?” she asked. They were in the man’s tent, “in the Jungle” the Calais camp site, where he and his friend had been living for the last month.

“Oh it must be so sad for you to still see his shoe on the floor over there…” said the reporter, interviewing the man who cousin died last week in the tunnel between Calais and Dover. It reminded me of the spoof news TV show, Drop the Dead Donkey, some years ago on Channel 4, where our reporter on the scene of the latest disaster pointed tearfully to a child’s toy in the rubble. That same teddy bear had been seen in Beirut, Gaza, Turkish earthquake sites and all over the world; it travelled in our reporter’s rucksack until he was rumbled.

Unbelievably for me at least, this is the pathetic level to which BBC radio news has fallen. I had already stopped watching the sensationalist, sentimental twaddle that BBC TV news become several years ago, but am saddened to see the disease spreading to the radio.

Welcome to Europe

I was fuming at the dumbed down, gutter level sentimentality shown by the reporter and the complete naivety of the man trying to get to Britain for ‘safety’ reasons.This story was not the story I was interested in. I wanted to hear, in the immigrants own words, why they thought Britain was the preferred destination over France or Italy. Of course, I think I already know the answer, but I wanted to hear it from them. But, oh no, we just got emotional drivel prompted by drivel questioning. I further wanted to hear, from the immigrant, what was so awful in their own country; and again, I think I know the answer BUT I wanted to hear it from the potential immigrant himself.

Another Pakistani, interviewed, who said he was 12 when he made the journey to Britain a few years ago was urged by his mother to undertake the perilous journey, said that ” … after all, it was the British who caused all these problems from which we flee, so the British should be proud to accept these people who so need our help.”

He has a point, but a very small one compared to the brutality of those who rule, or fail to rule, the countries from which these immigrants flee. Compared say, to the primitive ignorance of the Taliban, al–Qaeda, ISIS et all, all of whose political ideas of nationhood are based of the teachings of the Qur’an.

Here is my alternative take on this whole situation.

What a jolly good idea! Lets put the EU leaders in a boat and send them to Libya …

Whilst I am saddened by the plight of those who wish to escape war torn parts of the Middle East and Africa, I thought a little historical, world view light, might put the whole thing into perspective.

No one was there to help us when when in our more primitive times, we ran around the country killing each other smothered with woad whilst praying to Earth Mother and talking with fairies. There were no better run, safer countries to run to. So, over the next two thousand years or so, we grew up a bit, killed a load more of our young men, women and children, reduced the number of our gods to the last one still standing. Then, more recently still, quite a few of us are working on losing even that last one who is slowly disappearing day by day!

Perhaps, we should try harder to limit immigration to these Islands to a more realistic level? The last 20 years have been mismanaged by our under age career politicians to such an extent that the EU, and Britain in particular, have become a preferred, if dangerous, option for the world’s refugees.

Our Dave wants to defeat the poison of radical Islam, jolly good eh? Well, no, he still defends state funded faith schools. His use of the word poison, copies Blair, his hero, who has used the word poison in the same context many times since 2010. Yet, despite agreeing on the word, neither Blair nor Cameraman have the slightest clue about the nature of so-called radical Islam.

Cameraman’s Birmingham speech on the 21st July was welcome, but several years too late. He announced some short-term measures, but he dared not face, what needs to be done to address the problem.

He missed the reason that so many British educated, intelligent, Muslim young men and women have become radicalised.

I argue that the word radicalised misses the point entirely, and has led Dave, and many others, down the wrong path in search of a solution. He has not yet understood why so many young Muslims are ready to fight in Syria for Islamic State. He has not yet understood how their mind-set was so warped away from that of their parents, most of whom are as clueless as is our Dave.

He said, in his speech, “They start with intolerant views towards democracy, freedom of expression and sexual equality. If this is not challenged they often gravitate to even more extreme views.”

Radical preacher Anjem Choudary has claimed that all Muslim MPs and voters are ‘apostates’. This evil deluded monster walks the streets of Britain subsidised by our welfare system.

But, he did not, or dare not, explain that the source of that very intolerance is the Qur’an itself. The Qur’an is aided and abetted by Hadith(s) (supplementary instructions issued long after the original manual). Democracy is an alien concept to Islam. Muslims must instead submit to the will of Allah, as directed by the Qur’an and follow Sharia, Islamic law. Sharia only applies to Muslims, so it should follow that it can only be implemented in an Islamic state.

Indeed, it is arguable that Sharia is not actually Islamic in the first place. The word is mentioned in the Qur’an, three times, but in a completely different context. Sharia, or Islamic law, is based on older Jewish law and was written some 200 years later than the Qur’an itself. Anyway, I could be paddling up an intellectual creek here because so many Islamic scholars disagree with each other on this point, and who am I to offer help? 😉

(Ed: Ooh stop, it hurts!)

Britain however, is subject to the Rule of Law. One legal system to which all citizens, of whatever religion (or none), are accountable. Aristotle said this more than two thousand years ago, “The rule of law is better than that of any individual.”

Our politicians have pandered to Muslim sensitivities. They have mistakenly allowed Sharia courts to rule on “family matters” for example. This thin end of the wedge stupidity, has all but destroyed the last 1,000 years of western philosophical and legal development. Cultural differences have been allowed to fester into the divisions we see today. For example, the political corruption exposed in Tower Hamlets last month and postal voting corruption in Birmingham, Bradford etc.

ISIS (AKA ISIL or Da’ish) are just implementing the bits of the Qur’an that moderate Muslims had started to ignore. Just read a little of the Qur’an and you will soon see what I mean.

So then, you may ask, just how do we stop young minds becoming so warped?

All religions rely on child minds being in awe of something that is apparently bigger and more powerful than them. Better still if this power is invisible, how can you challenge that eh? Once this awe is instilled in a child’s mind, it becomes very difficult to remove in later life. This innate awe is enthusiastically used by those who radicalise disaffected young minds and by all religions, eager for new followers.

Dickens was quite correct then, but times have changed, even he could not see the rise of Mohammedanism (as it was then called)

Roman Catholics in Northern Ireland have found it almost impossible to accept that their Popes have silently covered up the sexual deviance of their priesthood for centuries. Only now when the evidence is overwhelming, have many Catholics found the strength to see the inherent evils in Roman Catholicism. Many still cannot accept the truth, and remain in awe of the Vatican’s clever use of art, music and pomp to hide its innate delusions. Charles Dickens clearly saw what Catholicism was, even if he was somewhat open to criticism in his own personal life.

Faith schools are therefore the source of the problem. The very idea of faith being taught as a valid and laudable path for young human minds to follow is warped. This thinking was exposed, by European Enlightenment philosophers, in the 17th & 18th centuries. They called for reason to replace faith. Notable amongst those thinkers was John Locke who advocated that religion must occupy the private sphere of life in order for the many different faiths to co-exist peacefully.

There are many contributing factors to radicalisation of course;

US / UK foreign policy in Iraq;

the Qur’an, seen by Muslims as the unalterable word of god;

Muslims must live under Sharia, Islamic law

Saudi funding for Madrassas in the UK;

misguided support for primitive cultural practices by politicians hungry for votes, in the name multiculturalism;

government’s fear of violent reprisals from minority communities;

Those are the starting points for the radicalisation process of those already affected by the awe of the faith virus. The rest follows on quite logically from that!

Yes, our democracy is flawed, but all other methods of political control are considerably worse (echoing the words of Winston Churchill). Humans will probably get there eventually, but not while religious groups all compete for separate privileges in the public sphere. One law, applicable to all please!

Free bus passes for Faith schools? Primitive halal and kosher practices being allowed to bypass the law because of religious exemption? Time off to pray? Bah, Poo & Piffle says I.

Come on Dave, get moving!

Meanwhile, more and more faith schools are created each year (200 more planned currently) to preach their message of otherness, difference and division thereby sowing the seeds of societal destruction that today’s young disaffected Muslims’ parents came here to escape. The irony is that the Birmingham schools at the centre of the Trojan horse scandal were not faith schools, but the exposure of their failings raised major questions marks about how faith schools operate. What is alarming is that if the Birmingham schools had been designated faith schools, then many of the practices condemned, such as limiting the curriculum to exclude lessons about sex education and reinforcing a cultural identity to the exclusion of others, would have been permitted!

I would have this next paragraph used in schools to promote discussion:

There is a reason that some 93% of the planet’s top scientist reject the notion of a personal god. The real mystery is why the other 7% don’t. After all, science is based on evidence and there is no evidence that god exists. None. What we may feel in our hearts is not evidence and neither is the bible since the argument is circular. (The bible is true because it says it is. The Qur’an is true because that is what Qur’an says.)

Simply asking faith schools nicely to be more inclusive will not work. A secular (free from religious dogma) education, for all children, is the only way to heal the divisions caused by faith schools.

Whilst even that will take several generations to work, I submit that there is no other way for human societies to develop in peace.

Vote hungry, party politicians are going to remove religion from schools? Let us hope so!

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The Riddle of Epicurus (341-270 BCE)
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?